News & Events

34 News items, Awards, Events or Talks found.



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  •  NEWS    IEEE Signal Processing Magazine: publication by Ye Wang, Shantanu D. Rane and others
    Date: August 19, 2013
    Where: IEEE Signal Processing Magazine
    MERL Contact: Ye Wang
    Research Area: Information Security
    Brief
    • The article "Secure Biometrics: Concepts, Authentication Architectures & Challenges" by Rane, S., Wang, Y., Draper, S.C. and Ishwar, P. was published in IEEE Signal Processing Magazine.
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  •  EVENT    ICASSP 2013 - Student Career Luncheon
    Date & Time: Thursday, May 30, 2013; 12:30 PM - 2:30 PM
    Location: Vancouver, Canada
    MERL Contacts: Anthony Vetro; Petros T. Boufounos; Jonathan Le Roux
    Research Area: Speech & Audio
    Brief
    • MERL is a sponsor for the first ICASSP Student Career Luncheon that will take place at ICASSP 2013. MERL members will take part in the event to introduce MERL and talk with students interested in positions or internships.
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  •  NEWS    ICASSP 2013: 9 publications by Jonathan Le Roux, Dehong Liu, Robert A. Cohen, Dong Tian, Shantanu D. Rane, Jianlin Guo, John R. Hershey, Shinji Watanabe, Petros T. Boufounos, Zafer Sahinoglu and Anthony Vetro
    Date: May 26, 2013
    Where: IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP)
    MERL Contacts: Dehong Liu; Jianlin Guo; Anthony Vetro; Petros T. Boufounos; Jonathan Le Roux
    Brief
    • The papers "Stereo-based Feature Enhancement Using Dictionary Learning" by Watanabe, S. and Hershey, J.R., "Effectiveness of Discriminative Training and Feature Transformation for Reverberated and Noisy Speech" by Tachioka, Y., Watanabe, S. and Hershey, J.R., "Non-negative Dynamical System with Application to Speech and Audio" by Fevotte, C., Le Roux, J. and Hershey, J.R., "Source Localization in Reverberant Environments using Sparse Optimization" by Le Roux, J., Boufounos, P.T., Kang, K. and Hershey, J.R., "A Keypoint Descriptor for Alignment-Free Fingerprint Matching" by Garg, R. and Rane, S., "Transient Disturbance Detection for Power Systems with a General Likelihood Ratio Test" by Song, JX., Sahinoglu, Z. and Guo, J., "Disparity Estimation of Misaligned Images in a Scanline Optimization Framework" by Rzeszutek, R., Tian, D. and Vetro, A., "Screen Content Coding for HEVC Using Edge Modes" by Hu, S., Cohen, R.A., Vetro, A. and Kuo, C.C.J. and "Random Steerable Arrays for Synthetic Aperture Imaging" by Liu, D. and Boufounos, P.T. were presented at the IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP).
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  •  NEWS    DCC 2013: publication by Petros T. Boufounos and Shantanu D. Rane
    Date: March 20, 2013
    Where: Data Compression Conference (DCC)
    MERL Contact: Petros T. Boufounos
    Research Area: Computational Sensing
    Brief
    • The paper "Efficient Coding of Signal Distances Using Universal Quantized Embeddings" by Boufounos, P.T. and Rane, S. was presented at the Data Compression Conference (DCC).
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  •  NEWS    IEEE Signal Processing Magazine: 2 publications by Petros T. Boufounos and Shantanu D. Rane
    Date: February 13, 2013
    Where: IEEE Signal Processing Magazine
    MERL Contact: Petros T. Boufounos
    Brief
    • The articles "Privacy-Preserving Nearest Neighbor Methods: Comparing Signals without Revealing Them" by Rane, S. and Boufounos, P.T. and "Privacy-preserving Speech Processing: Cryptographic and String-Matching Frameworks Show Promise" by Pathak, M.A., Raj, B., Rane, S. and Samaragdis, P. were published in IEEE Signal Processing Magazine.
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  •  NEWS    WIFS 2012: publication by Ye Wang, Shantanu D. Rane and others
    Date: December 2, 2012
    Where: IEEE International Workshop on Information Forensics and Security (WIFS)
    MERL Contact: Ye Wang
    Research Area: Information Security
    Brief
    • The paper "A Framework for Privacy Preserving Statistical Analysis on Distributed Databases" by Lin, B-R, Wang, Y. and Rane, S. was presented at the IEEE International Workshop on Information Forensics and Security (WIFS).
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  •  NEWS    ICIP 2012: 4 publications by Anthony Vetro, Shantanu D. Rane, Huifang Sun and Dong Tian
    Date: September 30, 2012
    Where: IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP)
    MERL Contacts: Anthony Vetro; Huifang Sun
    Brief
    • The papers "An Attribute-Based Framework for Privacy Preserving Image Querying" by Rane, S. and Sun, W., "Emerging Cryptographic Challenges in Image and Video Processing" by Puech, W., Erkin, Z., Barni, M., Rane, S. and Lagendijk, R.L., "A Local Depth Image Enhancement Scheme for View Synthesis" by Wang, Y., Tian, D. and Vetro, A. and "On Modeling the Rendering Error in 3D Video" by Cheung, N.-M., Tian, D., Vetro, A. and Sun, H. were presented at the IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP).
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  •  NEWS    MMSP 2012: publication by Petros T. Boufounos, Shantanu D. Rane and others
    Date: September 17, 2012
    Where: IEEE International Workshop on Multimedia Signal Processing (MMSP)
    MERL Contact: Petros T. Boufounos
    Research Areas: Digital Video, Computational Sensing
    Brief
    • The paper "Quantized Embeddings of Scale-Invariant Image Features for Mobile Augmented Reality" by Li, M., Rane, S. and Boufounos, P. was presented at the IEEE International Workshop on Multimedia Signal Processing (MMSP).
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  •  AWARD    MMSP 2012 Top 10% Paper Award
    Date: September 1, 2012
    Awarded to: Mu Li, Shantanu Rane and Petros Boufounos
    Awarded for: "Quantized Embeddings of Scale-Invariant Image Features for Mobile Augmented Reality"
    Awarded by: IEEE International Workshop on Multimedia Signal Processing (MMSP)
    MERL Contact: Petros T. Boufounos
    Research Areas: Digital Video, Computational Sensing
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  •  NEWS    IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security: publication by Ye Wang, Shantanu D. Rane and others
    Date: July 24, 2012
    Where: IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security
    MERL Contact: Ye Wang
    Research Area: Information Security
    Brief
    • The article "A Theoretical Analysis of Authentication, Privacy, and Reusability Across Secure Biometric Systems" by Wang, Y., Rane, S., Draper, S.C. and Ishwar, P. was published in IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security.
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  •  NEWS    ICME 2012: publication by Shantanu D. Rane and others
    Date: July 9, 2012
    Where: IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo (ICME)
    Research Area: Information Security
    Brief
    • The paper "A Distance-sensitive Attribute Based Cryptosystem for Privacy-Preserving Querying" by Sun, W. and Rane, S. was presented at the IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo (ICME).
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  •  TALK    Secure Computation and Interference in Networks: Performance Limits and Efficient Protocols
    Date & Time: Wednesday, January 4, 2012; 12:00 PM
    Speaker: Dr. Ye Wang, AgaMatrix, Inc.
    Abstract
    • In the field of Secure Multi-party Computation, the general objective is to design protocols that allow a group of parties to securely compute functions of their collective private data, while maintaining privacy (in that no parties reveal any more information about their personal data than necessary) and ensuring correctness (in that no parties can disrupt or influence the computation beyond the affect of changing their input data). Information theoretic approaches toward this broad problem, that provide provable (unconditional) security guarantees (even against adversaries that have unbounded computational power), have established that general computation is possible in a variety of scenarios. However, these general solutions are not always the most efficient or finely tuned to the requirements of specific problems and applications.

      In this talk, we will overview our work toward the development of efficient information theoretic approaches for secure multi-party computation applications within the common theme of secure computation and inference over a distributed data network. These applications include:

      1) private information retrieval, where the objective is to privately obtain data without revealing what was selected;
      2) secure statistical analysis, the problem of extracting statistics without revealing anything else about the underlying distributed data;
      3) secure sampling, which is the secure distributed generation of new data with a given joint distribution; and
      4) secure authentication, where the identity of a party needs to authenticated via inference on his credentials and stored registration data.

      Our contributions toward these applications include the following. We proposed a novel oblivious transfer protocol, applicable to private information retrieval, that trades off a small amount privacy for a drastic increase in efficiency. We leveraged a dimensionality reduction that exploits functional structure to simultaneously achieve arbitrarily high accuracy and efficiency in protocols that perform secure statistical analysis of distributed databases. Toward characterizing the region of distributions that can be securely sampled from scratch, we fully characterized the two-party scenario and provided inner and outer bounds on the multi-party scenario. Toward enabling secure distributed authentication, we proposed a two-factor secure biometric authentication system that is robust against the compromise of registered biometric data, allowing for revocability and providing resistance against cross-enrollment attacks.
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  •  NEWS    WIFS 2011: publication by Petros T. Boufounos and Shantanu D. Rane
    Date: November 29, 2011
    Where: IEEE International Workshop on Information Forensics and Security (WIFS)
    MERL Contact: Petros T. Boufounos
    Research Area: Information Security
    Brief
    • The paper "Secure Binary Embeddings for Privacy Preserving Nearest Neighbors" by Boufounos, P. and Rane, S. was presented at the IEEE International Workshop on Information Forensics and Security (WIFS).
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  •  TALK    Scheduling and Medium Access in Wireless Networks
    Date & Time: Friday, November 18, 2011; 12:00 PM
    Speaker: Shreeshankar Bodas, MIT
    Abstract
    • We look at the problem of designing "efficient" resource allocation algorithms for wireless networks. The volume of data transferred over the wireless network has been ever-growing, but the resources (time, frequency) are not growing at the same rate. We therefore need to design good resource allocation schemes to guarantee a good quality of service to the users.

      In the first part of the talk, we look at the wireless access network, such as Wi-Fi. We have three objectives: ensure high resource utilization, low user-perceived latency, while keeping the computational burden on the devices to a minimum. An interesting recent result by Shah et al says that these three objectives are incompatible with other, unless P=NP. We design a physical layer-aware medium access algorithm that simultaneously achieves the three objectives, and thereby show that the hardness result by Shah et al is an artifact of a simplistic view of the physical layer.

      The second part of the talk focuses on designing scheduling algorithms for wireless downlink networks, such as a cellular network. Our objectives (again) are high resource utilization, low per-user delay, and a "simple" algorithm. We outline the drawbacks of the classic MaxWeight-type algorithms, and design iterative resource allocation schemes that perform well on all the three fronts.
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  •  NEWS    ICIP 2011: 4 publications by Matthew E. Brand, Petros T. Boufounos, Shantanu D. Rane, Anthony Vetro and Dong Tian
    Date: September 11, 2011
    Where: IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP)
    MERL Contacts: Matthew Brand; Anthony Vetro; Petros T. Boufounos
    Brief
    • The papers "Distributed Compression of Zerotrees of Wavelet Coefficients" by Wang, Y., Rane, S., Boufounos, P. and Vetro, A., "A Trellis-based Approach for Robust View Synthesis" by Tian, D., Vetro, A. and Brand, M., "Concentric Ring Signature Descriptor for 3D Objects" by Nguyen, H.V. and Porikli, F. and "Parallel Quadratic Programming for Image Processing" by Brand, M. and Chen, D. were presented at the IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP).
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  •  NEWS    ICASSP 2011: 4 publications by Petros T. Boufounos, Zafer Sahinoglu and Shantanu D. Rane
    Date: May 22, 2011
    Where: IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP)
    MERL Contact: Petros T. Boufounos
    Brief
    • The papers "Compressive Sensing for Over-the-Air Ultrasound" by Boufounos, P.T., "Privacy Preserving Probabilistic Inference with Hidden Markov Models" by Pathak, M., Rane, S., Sun, W. and Raj, B., "Saturation-robust SAR Image Formation" by Wei, D. and Boufounos, P.T. and "Scale-Invariant GLRT in Stochastic Partially Homogeneous Environments" by Wang, P., Sahinoglu, Z., Pun, M.-O., Li, H. and Himed, B. were presented at the IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP).
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  •  NEWS    SPIE Defense, Security and Sensing, Algorithms for Synthetic Aperture Radar Imagery 2011: publication by Petros T. Boufounos, Shantanu D. Rane, Anthony Vetro and others
    Date: April 27, 2011
    Where: SPIE Defense, Security and Sensing, Algorithms for Synthetic Aperture Radar Imagery
    MERL Contacts: Anthony Vetro; Petros T. Boufounos
    Research Area: Digital Video
    Brief
    • The paper "Low-Complexity Efficient Raw SAR Data Compression" by Rane, S., Boufounos, P., Vetro, A. and Okada, Y. was presented at SPIE Defense, Security and Sensing, Algorithms for Synthetic Aperture Radar Imagery.
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  •  NEWS    ITA 2011: 2 publications by Philip V. Orlik, Shantanu D. Rane and others
    Date: February 6, 2011
    Where: IEEE Information Theory and Applications Workshop (ITA)
    MERL Contact: Philip V. Orlik
    Brief
    • The papers "An Information-Theoretic Analysis of Revocability and Reusability in Secure Biometrics" by Wang, Y., Rane, S., Draper, S.C. and Ishwar, P. and "Achieving Near-Exponential Diversity on Uncoded Low-Dimensional MIMO, Multi-User and Multi-Carrier Systems without Transmitter CSI" by Annavajjala, R. and Orlik, P.V. were presented at the IEEE Information Theory and Applications Workshop (ITA).
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  •  NEWS    WIFS 2010: publication by Wei Sun and Shantanu D. Rane
    Date: December 12, 2010
    Where: IEEE International Workshop on Information Forensics and Security (WIFS)
    Research Area: Information Security
    Brief
    • The paper "Privacy Preserving String Comparisons Based on Levenshtein Distance" by Rane, S. and Sun, W. was presented at the IEEE International Workshop on Information Forensics and Security (WIFS).
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  •  NEWS    NIPS 2010: publication by Shantanu D. Rane and others
    Date: December 9, 2010
    Where: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS)
    Research Area: Information Security
    Brief
    • The paper "Multiparty Differential Privacy via Aggregation of Locally Trained Classifiers" by Pathak, M., Rane, S. and Raj, B. was presented at Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS).
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  •  NEWS    PCS 2010: publication by Petros T. Boufounos, Shantanu D. Rane, Anthony Vetro and others
    Date: December 7, 2010
    Where: Picture Coding Symposium (PCS)
    MERL Contacts: Anthony Vetro; Petros T. Boufounos
    Research Area: Digital Video
    Brief
    • The paper "Wyner-Ziv Coding of Multispectral Images for Space and Airborne Platforms" by Rane, S., Wang, Y., Boufounos, P. and Vetro, A. was presented at the Picture Coding Symposium (PCS).
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  •  NEWS    MMSP 2010: publication by Anthony Vetro, Shantanu D. Rane and others
    Date: October 4, 2010
    Where: IEEE International Workshop on Multimedia Signal Processing (MMSP)
    MERL Contact: Anthony Vetro
    Research Area: Digital Video
    Brief
    • The paper "Toward Realtime Side Information Decoding on Multi-core Processors" by Momcilovic, S., Wang, Y., Rane, S. and Vetro, A. was presented at the IEEE International Workshop on Multimedia Signal Processing (MMSP).
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  •  NEWS    Allerton Conference on Communication, Control, and Computing 2010: publication by Wei Sun, Shantanu D. Rane and others
    Date: September 29, 2010
    Where: Allerton Conference on Communication, Control, and Computing
    Research Area: Information Security
    Brief
    • The paper "On Unconditionally Secure Computation with Vanishing Communication Cost" by Wang, Y., Rane, S., Sun, W. and Ishwar, P. was presented at the Allerton Conference on Communication, Control, and Computing.
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  •  NEWS    ICME 2010: publication by Wei Sun, Anthony Vetro and Shantanu D. Rane
    Date: July 19, 2010
    Where: IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo (ICME)
    MERL Contact: Anthony Vetro
    Research Area: Information Security
    Brief
    • The paper "Privacy-Preserving Approximation of L1 Distance for Multimedia Applications" by Rane, S., Sun, W. and Vetro, A. was presented at the IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo (ICME).
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  •  NEWS    ICASSP 2010: 9 publications by Anthony Vetro, Shantanu D. Rane and Petros T. Boufounos
    Date: March 14, 2010
    Where: IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP)
    MERL Contacts: Anthony Vetro; Petros T. Boufounos
    Brief
    • The papers "Privacy and Security of Features Extracted from Minutiae Aggregates" by Nagar, A., Rane, S.D. and Vetro, A., "Hiding Information Inside Structured Shapes" by Das, S., Rane, S.D. and Vetro, A., "Ultrasonic Sensing for Robust Speech Recognition" by Srinivasan, S., Raj, B. and Ezzat, T., "Reconstruction of Sparse Signals from Distorted Randomized Measurements" by Boufounos, P.T., "Disparity Search Range Estimation: Enforcing Temporal Consistency" by Min, D., Yea, S., Arican, Z. and Vetro, A., "Synthesizing Speech from Doppler Signals" by Toth, A.R., Raj, B., Kalgaonkar, K. and Ezzat, T., "Spectrogram Dimensionality Reduction with Independence Constraints" by Wilson, K.W. and Raj, B., "Robust Regression using Sparse Learning for High Dimensional Parameter Estimation Problems" by Mitra, K., Veeraraghavan, A.N. and Chellappa, R. and "Subword Unit Approaches for Retrieval by Voice" by Gouvea, E., Ezzat, T. and Raj, B. were presented at the IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP).
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